The Song That Wasn't Mine

I was lying in bed the other night with my earphones in, not doing anything in particular, when 

Another Love by Tom Odell started playing. It's my favourite track. And every single time it plays, my head goes to the same place.

Munnar. Four years ago. I was 24.

Clinten and I had left on a Saturday night on his bike. No planning, nothing. Just the idea that we should go, and then going. Five hours on the road, both of us fighting sleep, the cold getting sharper the higher we climbed. We reached in the morning completely wrecked. His cousin lives there, so we went to their place to freshen up and steal a quick nap.

I remember the house more than the view. It was sunny outside, but inside those walls it was properly cold, the kind of cold that makes you not want to get up from where you're sitting. We had a light breakfast. We were getting ready to head out and actually see the place.

And that's when it happened. Some boys staying nearby were also getting ready for their day, and they put Another Love on their speakers.

That's it. That's the whole memory.

Nothing happened. Nobody said anything meaningful. I didn't take a photo. It was a gap in the day, ten minutes between a nap and a plan, and a song I didn't choose came out of a speaker that wasn't mine.

Four years later, it's the part I still have.

What I think I'm actually missing

I've been trying to figure out what I feel when that song plays, because it isn't what I expected.

It isn't missing Munnar. I could go back next weekend if I wanted to. It isn't missing Clinten either, he's a phone call away. The trip is not the thing.

What I think I'm missing is the version of me who was standing in that room.

That guy had no idea he was in a moment worth keeping. He was cold and sleepy and waiting to leave. He wasn't collecting anything. He wasn't stepping outside himself to check whether this was going to be a good memory later. He was simply there, badly dressed and half-awake, with nowhere else to be and no opinion about it.

I don't think I can do that anymore. At least not the same way.

Somewhere all these years,  I started noticing my own life while I'm living it. I catch a good evening and immediately think, this is a good evening. I sit with friends and somewhere at the back of my head there's a small voice keeping score. It isn't a bad thing exactly. It might even be what people mean when they say you're maturing.

But there's a cost to it that nobody mentions, and the cost is this: once you learn to recognise a beautiful moment while it's happening, you can never have one by accident again.

That's the feeling, I think. It's not nostalgia for a place. It's a kind of homesickness for a self. For the person who was still capable of being somewhere without watching himself be there.